Sarah and I visit Springfield

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2 December 2011

This week superstar author Sarah Lotz and I visited Springfield Convent School in Wynberg to chat about our books, what it’s like to be a writer in South Africa, and in Sarah’s case, the trouble she gave her parents as a teenager.

We started off by chatting about our books, Deadlands and Dark Poppy’s Demise, and how we came about to write them.

Sarah and I both love Stephen King, and the more we talked, the clearer it became that true horror lies in what human beings are capable of doing to each other, which is the reason why my novels are set firmly in the here and now and why Sarah’s horror novel The Mall works on both commercial and literary levels.

The grade ten and eleven girls were abuzz with questions; asking us everything from how to get published; where we get our inspiration from; and how long it takes to write a novel; to what time we wake up in the morning and how old we are.

We ended off our visit with a quick reading from both our books.

200 Young South Africans

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10 June 2011

The Mail & Guardian printed its annual 200 Young South Africans supplement today. I was just one of many local creatives to make the prestigious list.

I’m in good company with fellow writers Cynthia Jele, Mandy Wiener and Sam Wilson on the 2011 list. Previous Young South Africans include Lauren Beukes, Zukiswa Wanner and Andy Peterson.

Here’s the link.

Short story: First Date

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They were on a date. It was very by the book.
His mother had pressed a crisp one hundred rand note into his hand before she dropped them off at the entrance to the carnival.
To her credit, she kept the embarrassing behaviour to a minimum.
It was a perfect night; not too cold with a cloudless sky ablaze with stars. It was a night where magic could happen.

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My first FLF as a panelist

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16 May 2011

I attended the Franschhoek Literary Festival this year as a first-time speaker.

I first attended the festival in 2009 as a guest of my editor Helen Moffett. It was a squeal inducing experience with lots of encounters with my literary heroes (Tom Eaton, Finuala Dowling, Max du Preez etc) and lots of running around in the rain (it was the year that Cape Town experienced that frightening storm to end all storms that managed to blow itself into the winelands).
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Interview with Kate Cann

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4 April 2011

I tend to wax lyrical about the importance of plot in YA novels.

Teens want to be entertained. They want to be thrilled, to sit on the edge of their seats. That’s why I love Kate Cann. She’s written about twenty books for teens, which are all nail-bitingly brilliant. Instead of deadpan girl-meets-boy stories that have as much depth as a small puddle, her books are enthralling, plot driven and most importantly, real.
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Youth lit in South Africa

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18 April 2011

It’s an interesting time to be a youth writer in South Africa.

International trends change almost daily. One day vampires are all the rage, the next its ghosts or angels or even steam punk. South African authors are far from asleep to what’s happening abroad. Lily Herne, for example, just published South Africa’s first zombie novel, Deadlands; the Trantraal brothers released their second graphic novel last year, and John van der Ruit’s Spud was adapted into a feature film starring John Cleese.

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Behind-the-scenes of the Dark Poppy book trailer

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28 April 2011

Book trailers are neat little things. They’re like film trailers, except instead of trying to get audiences excited about upcoming films based on novels, they showcase the novels themselves.

For my upcoming book, Dark Poppy’s Demise I called up girl power director extraordinaire, Kirby Kruger, to help me out with a trailer.
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